The Arterburn Radio Transmission Podcast
The Arterburn Radio Transmission is a blend of cutting edge commentary, fused with guests who are the newsmakers and trailblazers of our time. Your host Tony Arterburn is a former Army paratrooper, entrepreneur, and historian. Tony brings his unique perspective to the issues facing our country, civilization, and planet.
The Arterburn Radio Transmission Podcast
#38 Paratruther -Gold: How it Shaped History with Alan Ereira
The mysterious power of gold to shape human civilization extends far deeper than most realize. In this captivating conversation with Alan Ereira, author of "Gold: How It Shaped History," we uncover gold's extraordinary journey through time and its profound impact on humanity.
Herrera reveals how his work with the Kogi people of Colombia sparked his fascination with gold. This indigenous culture, which managed to resist Spanish colonization by retreating to their mountain sanctuary, maintains a sacred relationship with gold as the "fundamental source of fertility in the world." Their warnings about excessive gold extraction mirror concerns voiced by ancient Roman writer Pliny, suggesting a cross-cultural understanding that modern society has forgotten.
The archaeological evidence tells a remarkable story. Six thousand seven hundred years ago at Varna on the Black Sea shores, the first known deliberate use of gold created what we immediately recognize as royal regalia - a crown, scepter, and chest disc. This same pattern appeared independently across civilizations separated by vast distances and time, suggesting something deeply ingrained in human psychology connects gold with power and divinity.
Perhaps most fascinating is gold's cosmic origin. The tremendous forces required to create gold atoms likely came from neutron star collisions - catastrophic events visible across the universe. This means all Earth's gold arrived after our planet formed, deposited from space in a cosmic jackpot that continues to influence our destiny.
From ancient Babylon to modern central banks, gold's monetary role has shaped economies and empires. When Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem for its temple gold, he unwittingly caused inflation that disrupted ancient economies. Similarly, when Spanish conquistadors brought American gold to Europe, it transformed the social order. Yet through all these fluctuations, gold maintains its purchasing power in ways fiat currencies cannot match.
As we navigate today's financial uncertainties and potential shifts away from dollar hegemony, gold's enduring significance offers perspective on what truly constitutes value in our world. Whether viewed as sacred substance or economic anchor, gold continues its millennia-long relationship with humanity, connecting us to our past while potentially securing our future.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. This is a special episode for the podcast. I've wanted to have this gentleman on the show for quite a while. I grabbed his book off of Kindle originally I was flying out to do an episode of Tinfoil Hat out in LA and got into his book and I thought, wow, this is absolutely amazing. It's right up my alley. We're going to really really dig into it. It's a deep history of gold and it's called Gold how it Shaped History. My guest is Alan Herrera and he's been generous and gracious enough to join me and talk about this magnificent book. Alan, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you for that wonderful introduction. I'm very glad to be here, thank you.
Speaker 1:Well, like I said originally, this has been since December and it's a dense history and very well written I mean beautifully written. Actually, there's an excerpt I want to read here in a minute that, just right out of the gate, captures, I think, the picture that you wanted to paint of how gold flows through history and it really is surprisingly interlinked in so many ways. You know how we view money and how we view value, and we're going to really dig into some of that history. I got some questions for you, but I wanted you to talk a little bit about your story and what inspired you to write this, because it it's, it's a body of work that I think, um, it's unlike any other history of of metals, like I've read, you know, narrative histories of gold or silver, and that's because that's what I do, being being a precious metals dealer and this is my wheelhouse as a podcaster. But this is the most unique history that I've ever read and I wanted to see what your process was. What inspired you to do this?
Speaker 2:Well, what inspired me? I didn't ever intend to do it until I got instructed to. I didn't ever intend to do it until I got instructed to. I've been working for over 30 years about 35 years with an indigenous people in the northern part of Colombia, who are totally extraordinary because they are the one civilization that did not get transformed by the Spanish invasion. They're on the highest coastal mountain in the world and that provided a refuge for them, and so, although the Spanish tried to take over and try to destroy them, they had somewhere to retreat to, and the reason that they have survived is that they actually do believe that they have the job of taking care of the world, and this supreme sense of responsibility means that they cannot allow themselves to lose their culture and their knowledge, and their knowledge of how to look after nature, which they believe is absolutely fundamental to the survival of the planet. And they believe that this extraordinary mountain that they're on is a version of the planet in miniature that they're taking care of, because it rises all the way from the Caribbean tropical seas to glaciers in a very short distance, and so you have all these different microclimates on the mountain, and they have an extraordinary understanding of this world and understand themselves to be part of it, and that their survival and its survival are the same thing.
Speaker 2:They had hidden themselves away for a long time, since the conquest, and then they came to the conclusion in recent decades that towards in the 80s, that they were failing to look after the world because the damage we do is so massive. And at that point, as a television producer, I made contact with them and said if you want to speak to the world, I can help you. And they went with that, and they decided that this was an opportunity that they should seize to tell us that we're destroying the world. Of course, they thought we didn't know and they thought that by telling us we would change our ways. Well, they got that bit wrong, but they kept trying to explain to me and the camera what was wrong with what we do, some of which we already knew even then. We knew, some of which we didn't know and still don't. Uh, and one of the key things that they kept on about was how important it is to treat gold correctly, because gold, they kept assuring me, is the fundamental source of fertility in the world, and if you um upset its behavior and mistreat it, then you are actually destroying the capacity of the planet to survive, and of us to survive, and all plants and everything. This seemed very mysterious to me.
Speaker 2:So, in the making of the film that we made together, I played down the emphasis on gold because I thought if I don't understand it, the audience aren't going to understand it and that is going to just create a puzzle in everybody's minds and they aren't going to buy into everything else that they're saying, which we know is really important. Um, and actually my own belief at that point was, like all the rest of us, I think, if gold were to vanish from the earth and there wasn't any gold, what would change anything? Probably nothing, um, and that was my attitude. But the coggy kept coming back to this year after year, saying you've got to understand the nature of gold, it's really fundamentally important. And so I began, on the basis of this constant hammering, to start to look at the history of gold in other cultures to see if there was anything that reflected what the Kogi were talking about. And that's when the kind of thunderbolt hit that I realized that what the Kogi were saying was only strange to us, it was not strange to our ancestors, and on a global scale, to our ancestors.
Speaker 2:And on a global scale, you can see that gold was regarded as obviously, fundamentally, basically important to the connection between the material world and the world that surrounds us, the invisible world that surrounds us, and it's kind of the portal between them and, from the Kogi perspective, through that portal, that is the doorway of life and death.
Speaker 2:So this really matters. So that's what took me into this and therefore took me into this huge study, initially, of what are the different cultures and how have they regarded gold and why and what sense can we make of it then? Well, where does that contribute to us regarding gold as having some kind of intrinsic value, even though we don't have the faintest idea why or where that comes from? And how has that then fed into the notion that gold is value? And how did that idea that gold is value and monetary value, the basis of all trade and commerce, how did that have an impact on the development of the global economy? Because it did have a colossal impact, simply because we committed ourselves to representing the global economy in a limited material substance which we would constantly be running out of, and that has driven the whole of our history.
Speaker 1:It's fascinating too that the Kogi and you're right about this and they, they revere gold, obviously, and they take it from the surface, but their issue is the extraction, the digging, the you know, the extreme mining and the things that, especially the modern day, you know you're miles below the earth's surface and you go to places like south africa and it's it's uh, it's like an entire metropolis under there.
Speaker 1:It's insane the amount of excavation that goes on. So their issue is that we're doing too much. It's a sacred metal, it's a sacred substance, but too extracted.
Speaker 2:It's an organic part of the world and, if you start, and because we don't see the earth as a connected, interconnected body, we don't see the earth as a as a connected, interconnected body we don't see an issue with lifting some of its organs out and effectively, you know, tearing out the kidney or whatever, because we don't understand that it can be a kidney, that it can be totally connected to everything else, whereas their perception of nature and the world is that everything is completely interconnected and bound together. And that attitude about deep digging, I discover, is not at all unique to the indigenous people in America. The Romans were saying exactly the same thing. That came as a big surprise.
Speaker 1:It was Plinomius, how do you pronounce it? The Roman writer Pliny, yes, yeah.
Speaker 2:And other writers, but Pliny, yes, went for it in quite a big way, yes, and that this was absolutely monstrous and that it's this business of digging into the earth and taking it. Now, when the coggy told me all this, we that was that. I mean this first conversation about it, 1990, when they were saying you've got to stop taking gold out of the earth, the deep digging it's got to stop. Between 1990 and now we have taken out as much gold from the earth as we took out in the entire history of humanity up to 1990. So it was roughly 100,000 tons was in the world when the Kogi started talking about it to me, and double that now. We have actually accelerated the rate of plunder spectacularly. Accelerated the rate of plunder spectacularly.
Speaker 2:Now, the coggy idea of science is different from ours in that our science is. We like to try and think that our science is about notions of cause and effect. What makes one thing happen? Until you've established cause and effect, perhaps you haven't got a scientific basis for what you're talking about.
Speaker 2:The coggy notion of science is much more to do with correlation. They don't have a written language. Their knowledge of the world is entirely oral, passed from generation to generation with years and years and years of oral teaching. Their experts are all trained for 18 years in the dark, taught everything that the society can provide them with as knowledge. So they have this vast body of knowledge and the way in which they understand it is what is the correlation between one thing and another? Rather similar, actually, to the way in which artificial intelligence works. In terms of artificial intelligence create works by pattern recognition, and the coggy worked much the same way, using all this knowledge to see the patterns in it, and so for them. It was not at all surprising to understand, to know that as our looting accelerated, so changes in the planet accelerated and the problems of survival of species became deeper and deeper and deeper, and new diseases kept appearing, like AIDS and COVID and so on. All of which they were saying beforehand, that this is going to happen if you carry on, and so on.
Speaker 1:All of which they were saying beforehand that this is going to happen if you carry on. It's so interesting that this isolated tribe and again, I love that you open with this theme too, because it overlays and you mentioned this earlier this metal, this substance, how it interlocks and has so much across oceans and time All throughout human history. It links us from one civilization to the next and we'll definitely talk about this, like the difference between the Persian view of gold and the Macedonian or Greek view of gold at the same time, in the same time in history perhaps, or Babylonian view of what gold was, not necessarily a monetary mind, but it's so interwoven throughout the story of humanity and this particular event that you know. You didn't go down there to interview them about gold. It wasn't on your mind. You had to. Actually, it had to cycle through many, many times for years. They had to bully me, yeah right, and so it cycled through and this prompted you to write this book. As a matter of fact, I actually read an excerpt of this when I gave a talk in Mexico, because it was so fascinating to me that you put this synopsis together of just some of my thoughts on. We might not share the exact same viewpoints on what gold is, but it definitely stuck out to me when I read this this is from your introduction of your book is something ancient and visceral happening, connected to the old magical power that makes us believe that gold is an unchanging store of value, as you cannot eat it, warm yourself with it, grow anything from it or wrap yourself in it.
Speaker 1:You might describe it as inherently worthless. Nations have no actual use for it except as security against the day when everything else loses its value. Possessing it is an act of faith, not of reason. A lump of gold has no more inherent value than a Bitcoin or a painting. It is simply worth what someone will give for it, which is not fixed in any way. Its value is subjective, a dreamed bulwark against collapse. The size of a nation's gold reserve measures the darkness of its nightmares. Now that's that's. Uh. I just I chills when I read that on the plane, you know, six, seven months ago I go, he's capturing a snapshot of something. I think that again is that's the mystery. That's the question mark that hangs over all of this is, you know, gold, and silver too, but gold especially. Like. What is it about this metal that it's so connected to us?
Speaker 2:And it seems to be cultural, independent of culture. What happens to it is that sense of value is not connected to the cultures, to any specific culture or any specific moment in our history. It's always there. I mean, one of the strangest examples of that, I think, is that when Nixon went off the gold standard in 1971, the Nixon shock and said that the dollar would no longer be exchangeable for gold. A lot of people began to think well, that's it. Gold will now have no particular value because its value was its monetary value in the exchange between that and the dollar.
Speaker 2:And some years later, in fact, the British Chancellor, gordon Brown, sold half Britain's gold reserves because he thought there was no point in having them because gold was not going to increase in value. And yet when he did that, when Nixon did that, that was when we bought the house I'm sitting in here, and the cost of that house in gold sovereigns if we'd paid for it in gold sovereigns would have been around 2,000 gold sovereigns. The house has increased in terms of pounds since then by a multiple of about 145. Its price in gold sovereigns hasn't changed.
Speaker 1:That's the magic trick about gold as a monetary use, as opposed to what modern currency and fiat currency is, and they don't teach, especially in this country. They don't teach you that, it's just inflation, because it's superstition, isn't it?
Speaker 1:Right, you're not supposed to know that, it's something that is burned into your mind, that inflation is just part of life, you know, and that, uh, you know you have to invest and there's all these other things, and that's. That's a completely different rabbit hole. But you're absolutely right. Gold, even with you know. You mentioned something earlier and when you interviewed the, the kobe, in 1990, and there was 100,000 tons of gold that had ever been mined and then it's doubled since that time.
Speaker 2:And even with that, even with the… that doesn't change its value, correct? Yes, that's right, it's unrelated to supply.
Speaker 1:Oh, isn't that interesting.
Speaker 2:And also, obviously, because gold is completely indestructible. Every piece of gold that we have had we've still got. Almost all, yes, yes, the only stuff that can disappear is either stuff that gets lost somehow in granulation or is mixed in a special acid that can dissolve gold, from which it can be recovered again.
Speaker 1:It's like shipwrecks and things like that. I mean just fractions of the actual supply that was mined.
Speaker 2:But they're all still there. Yes, yes, it doesn't go anywhere. I mean, it's not like copper, of which there is less and less copper. Once it gets mined, the amount of copper in the world goes down because it reacts with other things. The same applies to iron it changes into something else. Gold will never change into anything else. It will always just be gold. And one of the as you know, one of the extraordinary things about gold is that you can hammer it down to the thickness of a thousandth of a sheet of paper and you can roll it up and still make the same object that you were hammering in the first place, and you can draw that. If it's an ounce of gold, you can draw it out to a thread miles long, 50 miles long, and you can roll that up again and again. You can make the original gold ring or whatever it was that you started with. It doesn't change. There's nothing else like that value too.
Speaker 1:I mean it does it's. It's not quite like silver. I mean silver is an industrial metal. It's the most thermoconductive metal, along with the monetary gold has, and perhaps it hasn't had enough study or there isn't enough emphasis on it, but uh, medical uses um, medical uses are slight.
Speaker 2:Um, obviously, from the time of the egyptians, it was being used to help fix people's teeth, and that's precisely because it doesn't react with anything in the body. It's the one unreactive substance you can put in people's mouths and it will still be there. And, incidentally, for that reason, in ancient times, when gold coins were very precious and very, very tiny, the place where you kept your gold money was in your mouth.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's true. I was thinking in your book. There was another aspect to this too that I didn't know, and you always think some people say gold and silver is god's money or something like that, because it comes from the earth, but actually gold is extraterrestrial.
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely nobody understands where the hell it comes from, because the process by which um subatomic particles can be pushed together with such force as to create atoms of gold is so colossal that the process that created the solar system didn't come anywhere near it. That wouldn't have created any gold at all. Um. So the only way in which we think gold can have been produced at the moment the man the best guess is by the uh collision of um ultra massive uh star bodies at the end of their lives, which hit each other colossally large, at almost the speed of light, and produce a galactic explosion of such brilliance that it crosses the whole universe.
Speaker 2:And possibly out of that comes the gold that we find on Earth. So all the gold, as far as we know, that is on earth has arrived after the earth was formed, because anything that was on the earth when it was forming would have sunk into the center because it's so heavy. So all the gold that is found arrived after the earth already existed. It has to have been deposited here, it has to be from a very, very distant interstellar explosion of colossal magnitude, and then somehow we won a jackpot there is gold over the whole planet. In fact it's rare in one sense in that its distribution is small, but it's not rare in another sense because it's actually everywhere. The ocean's full of gold. All living things are full of gold, but only tiny, tiny quantities.
Speaker 1:Yeah, every living thing. And I forget the actual measurement how much gold in the ocean, you know, per liter.
Speaker 2:There isn't. Every hundred pounds of seawater you will get a tiny tiny bit of gold, but the other curious thing about this interconnection between civilizations all reacting the same way.
Speaker 2:One of the strangest things the very first culture that we know of that used gold. This was a culture on the shores of the Black Sea 6,700 years ago. A cemetery discovered in a place called Varna on the shore, and there is a cemetery that contains in the graves not necessarily with bodies, but in graves six kilograms of gold, which is a fair quantity. These are the first people who have been using it at all, and only one of the bodies in this cemetery has actually got gold on the body. And it's got a lot of gold on the body. A high percentage about a third of the gold in the cemetery is on this one body. And what has it got? It's got gold around the head which has clearly fallen off some perishable headdress, a crown, and the right hand is a stick with a hitting object on the end of gold wrapped in gold. It's got a gold scepter and in the middle of the chest is a big gold disc.
Speaker 2:What you're looking at is immediately recognizable. We know what that is. That is the regalia of a king. That's the first use of gold and it gets immediately translated, or very shortly after the first discoveries into this concept of a specific regalia. And that regalia we in england are terribly familiar with it because it was being used, uh, two years ago in westminster abbey to crown charles the third, who also had a golden crown, a golden scepter and in the disc could become an orb. And you also find that there's no connection between this civilization and that one, which was completely destroyed and forgotten after 250 years. And you get exactly the same regalia in South America, long, long before Columbus, a thousand years before Columbus. You have the gold headdress, the gold scepter, the gold disc, some sort of mind worm. I don't know how you explain this.
Speaker 1:That's the mystery interwoven through this and one of the other fascinating parts about your book that I don't believe I'd ever heard the nomenclature or described the you want to talk about the skeleton horizon. Is that part of the Arna story?
Speaker 2:That civilization. This was the first place to use gold. It starts to use it in intricate ways. They develop a good metallurgy. This is the beginning of metallurgy. Right, we're at the start of the Copper Age.
Speaker 2:They're using the process of using kilns to do stuff. Presumably, first of all, they're using it to make pottery and then and their pottery is fabulous, wonderful stuff and then they develop it to. They discover copper, and you can develop copper in you by smelting. And then they find how did they get the gold? I don don't know, gathering up from a river bed would be extremely difficult to gather that much quantity for these tiny populations. It may be that they found a few nuggets, one big nugget or some smaller nuggets maybe. Anyway, they are making gold and they're using it as a celebration, or more than a celebration, of power.
Speaker 2:There is now hierarchy in what was a hunter-gatherer and early, early agricultural world, and suddenly you have a person who is distinguished by this costume in death of regalia, by this costume in death of regalia, and it implies an entirely new kind of civilization, of culture, in which you have specialization of people who are doing different kinds of works and not every family is doing the same work in order to be able to produce gold, to get it, to mine it, to smelt it, to make it, you need specialist technicians and workers and those are going to have to be supported by other members of the society. So you have a completely new kind of society which is recognizable to us, which is a differentiated society, and this is there for about 250 years, and then it gets completely wiped out. Something happens, obviously, the people, other people in the region don't seem to get on with this differentiated society and they slaughter them. And the cities, the towns they're actually little towns, 250 people or so they're completely destroyed and you get a site where there's one called Unatsite which is actually the one where the oldest gold object was found which is completely turned into a charnel house, and the assault on it is done at a time when the men aren't there. So it's another society which has come in militarily, and this is the beginning of military type conflict a group of people acting together as soldiers. It's the first time we see it. It may have existed in other places, it may have existed in earlier times, but we don't have that evidence. Here we have clear evidence. These are people using weapons for slaughter. And Unasite is. Everybody in it is killed, the heads are all smashed in, they're heaped up in buildings which are then burned, and the whole site is then covered in a layer of ash.
Speaker 2:This when the archaeologists are digging. They look for evidence of a change from one time to another as they're digging down, and that changes. The space where that happens is called a horizon, and here it's called the skeleton horizon, for obvious reasons. It's where the dead are. This whole civilization has perished, gone, and its memory doesn't survive. There are no stories about that culture. There's no evidence that anybody ever went back to get the gold. Um, they clearly didn't. The cemetery isouched not like ancient Egypt, for example. There's no interest in getting the gold and the use of gold really isn't seen again for about 1,000 years, and it first props up about 1,000 miles away. So there's nothing inherited from that Varna civilization, that Bulgarian civilization. But what they're doing then starts being done again. The same kind of objects being made again. It's very odd.
Speaker 1:No connection whatsoever, no possible connection whatsoever. No history passed down.
Speaker 2:No, nothing. No, we don't have any story with no sign of any stories, I mean later on you do have signs of stories, so stories like the golden fleece, for example, which comes from the other side of the black sea, um, from georgia, um, there you have stories which get passed down. By the time we come across written stories or pictures of the Jason story, that story is already very old. But there is no such transmission of the stories of Varna, of the Bulgarian side.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and is that the cover of your book?
Speaker 2:That is that figure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm going to show it here. That is a reconstruction. Reconstruction yeah, Very interesting.
Speaker 2:And there's a photograph of the actual excavation inside.
Speaker 1:And you have some. There's some good photographs in the hardcover book, for sure. Oh, and especially their digital has it. But I love the hardcover yeah but I love the hardcover.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, everybody loves hardcover books because somehow you can't remember an electronic reading of a book because it's not associated with any physical activity, whereas if you read a hardback book, you've got a piece of paper and your experience of reading the book and of where you are when you're reading the book makes the book in a way more real in your memory. You have a physical memory of as well as a conceptual memory I like the, the tactile experience of having an actual book.
Speaker 1:I'll find that because I travel a lot and um, that I'll get, I'll just double up. I'll also put one on my Kindle for reference and things. But yeah, it's something that you can't reproduce, that and that's why I love. I love physical books, even though they're going out of style, unfortunately, I think, in so many ways, like it's hard to, it's harder to get them.
Speaker 2:Yes, well, you still can't beat the old scroll. Can you the scroll? Beat the old scroll, can you?
Speaker 1:The scroll, get a good scroll. Well, I wanted to ask you too. Just while we're still on the gold in ancient times I read I think it was a history of gold by Matthew Hart. I don't know if you've heard of this book. He wrote a history of gold and this is something that stuck out in my memory for many, many years. But he said that before the, the columbus uh, just, you know, quote unquote discovered the new world. You have the in the western hemisphere that all the of the gold in the known world prior to 1492 could fit in a six by six foot cube. So that's all of the gold that never been mine. Does that sound about right to you?
Speaker 2:Well uh well, I it's. It's not too far out of line. Yeah, um, why don't? I haven't done that particular piece of arithmetic, but I do reckon that in the uh, uh, 14th, 13th century Europe, all the gold that Europe had would have just about fitted in a bathtub.
Speaker 1:That's fascinating. You know, in your history too, you talk about, and I think there was a difference between a very big difference, stark difference between the Persian Empire the way that they viewed gold, or the Babylonian Empire, or the Babylonians themselves how they viewed gold, and the way that Alexander the Great and the Macedonians and the Greeks or the Romans would have viewed gold as is that a correct analysis.
Speaker 2:I think, absolutely. History begins, as far as we're concerned, being literary people, with Herodotus and his history of the Persian War, of the Persian War, and that book which tells the story of the great conflict between Greece and Persia. He sees that as being where history begins. He's writing in the 5th century, so he's kind of close to it. Bc I'm talking about here and that war. What he doesn't reflect on, but it's really significant, significant is a war between gold and silver.
Speaker 2:Persia expresses itself in gold, um, and it issues gold coins, which are not really monetary, but they are representations of power and their way power is exercised. In persia. There's no market, so, uh, it doesn't have markets at all, uh, and it's uh, so it's. Everything is essentially the property of the great king, the king of kings, um, so trade isn't something that can be done by negotiation, um, but coinage doesn't serve that purpose. What the gold discs do, with their image of the king stamped on them as an archer, they are indications of the royal favor. So everybody who wants a place in the royal court or the structures of power knows that being granted access to gold, these golden discs, is very, very important, because that's their whole status, depends on these gold, what we would consider coins and do consider coins.
Speaker 2:In Athens, the currency is silver and they have very pure and very beautiful silver. They make beautiful silver coins. They don't carry an image of the king of kings or anything like that. They carry an image of Athena and the owl. It's the protector of the city.
Speaker 2:And as far as the Greeks are concerned, as far as the Athenians are concerned, gold is the currency of tyrants. It speaks of tyranny and the silver currency. Herodotus is very strong on this. What Athens represents is democratic fairness, exchange, trade, a commercial and social compact that allows society to flourish, and that, to him, is what really matters and also is ultimately the key to the Greeks defeating the Persians. Tyranny will stumble and fall when faced with the power of a society which bonds together in taking responsibility for its actions.
Speaker 2:Democratic society that's the first history book, that's where everything comes from in our way of thinking about these things, which is really quite striking and splendid, and it's so obvious to Herodotus that he doesn't even talk about that, but it's the story he's telling, nevertheless, and the of, of course, what happens. Although silver wins over gold in that conflict, gold ultimately triumphs in the ancient world and, uh, the reason that gold triumphs in the ancient world is because gold is the offering to the gods that people who are neither Greeks nor Persians want to make, particularly the Celts. And what the Celts are above all is mercenaries. So if you want to put together an army in the ancient world and you're going to have to hire it you're going to need gold coins. Not because the gold coins will buy I guess they will allow the soldiers to buy things to increase their physical wealth but most importantly, it allows them to make offerings to the gods.
Speaker 2:And the gold that the Celts get a great deal of it goes into the ground and into the lakes, but what it's doing is financing armies, and that is where the balance of power becomes really important.
Speaker 1:There's also you mentioned the. Athenians and the Persians and the difference and, of course, athena's image on the silver coins and that, that stark difference. And then I I didn't know this, but you go to the in your work, you go, you mentioned the book of Daniel and the Bible and you that story of the writing on the wall and I thought your, your viewpoint on that was really you want to explain that it's very interesting and it has to do with that silver to gold.
Speaker 2:It is exactly. It is to do with the silver. Well, the whole thing of silver and gold in the ancient world is tremendously important. One thing I really should mention is the way in which gold currency actually comes into existence, Because the first coins that are being made as I'm sure you and anybody who's interested in the history of coinage knows they are silver gold alloy called electrum, made in Lydia. And these stators they're called, and these staters they're called are the basic units of trading value, and the reason that they exist is because electrum is a natural blend of gold and silver.
Speaker 2:It was very useful for traders because they could carry much more wealth, as it were, much more trading wealth in the form of electrum than they could have silver. Electrum contains gold, which was worth at the time roughly 10 times the value of silver, so it's meant you could cart more of it about from one place to another. And so long as you have a stable relationship between the value, the ratio between gold and silver values, then this coinage makes complete sense. And the bright idea of the King of Lydia was all these traders are turning up with electrum, which is undifferentiated.
Speaker 2:Nobody knows exactly how much gold and how much silver there is in what a particular trader has brought. So it's got to be tested in every transaction. There's got to be a touchstone test or some kind of test to find out what its actual value is, how much of it is gold, how much of it is silver. This is tedious. So what the king of Sardis does is say look, you give me your electrum, I will test it, I will have my guys define its value, and then they'll give you coins that are a precise mixture of gold and silver to the value of what you've given me. That's what the coinage is, which is a wonderful way of accelerating business, and he's able to charge a significant premium for doing it.
Speaker 1:So he does very well out of it.
Speaker 2:Everybody's very pleased with it. It means trade flourishes in the ancient world on these huge trade routes which are coming all the way up a thousand miles or more from babylon and from other cities which have no access to metal and have no access to stone, but which do have huge quantities of agricultural produce and they can do big exchanges. So this is very valuable. But then Babylon becomes the dominant power by conquering Assyria and in the process a new king of Babylon arises called Nebuchadnezzar, who has the wonderful idea that now that he has supreme power and has defeated Assyria, he should turn Babylon into a city that is unrivaled in the history of the world. He is going to make it glow and flourish and he is going to build a new kind of city which is fabulous. This is the place of the hanging gardens of Babylon and the Babylon that everybody fantasizes about at the time. In order to do it, he's going to have to get a lot of material from outside his territory. He's going to have to go trading. He's going to have to buy all kinds of stuff. For that he's going to need gold.
Speaker 2:Where is the biggest quantity of gold? Well, it actually happens to be in Jerusalem, and the Jerusalem temple is a great store of gold. When Babylon was fighting Assyria, the king of Israel invited Babylonian emissaries to come and have a look at how much gold he had, because he was hoping to get them to assist him and create some kind of union to defeat Assyria. That didn't go anywhere, but what it meant was that Babylon knew where the gold was, and that explains this utterly mysterious assault of Babylon on Jerusalem. Because Jerusalem's not on a trade route and it's not on a military road, and yet Nebuchadnezzar launches an attack which lasts for 30 months. It ties up the entire military power of the empire for 30 months. Why would he do that?
Speaker 1:We now know that?
Speaker 2:the answer is it was for the gold, and you can see the effect of that. After he succeeds, he takes Jerusalem apart, stone by stone, in order to get it everything in there, takes it all back to Babylon, releases it onto the market. Because Babylonian temples kept records of prices every month, prices of six commodities for 450 years. You have a continuous financial record and each monthly record of prices of those commodities is tied to a description of the positions of the planets, which means that we have a date for every price in this 450-year record. So these are called the astronomical diaries for that reason. So that means that this has only recently been translated. It's all in the British Museum and that means that we can now see the sudden inflation that hit after the destruction of the temple of jerusalem.
Speaker 2:The release of all this gold onto the market, which had the effect in the ancient world that the discovery of america had in the 16th century flooding the world with gold. The effect of flooding the world with gold at that point was that the relative values of gold and silver went out of sync. So instead of the coin containing a known ratio of gold and silver that made sense, the ratio now had gone so far out of sync that the silver in the stator was worth more than the stator. So they start melting the stators down and and in excavation in sardis, a friend of mine who was a british museum metallurgist and archaeologist, found one of the sites where they were melting down the status and extracting, separating the gold from the silver. This completely wrecked must have completely wrecked the economy of the ancient world. Trade becomes impossible because there isn't a coinage anymore. Um, sardis is in deep trouble. At that point the king of sardis dies and is replaced by a guy called croesus, and is replaced by a guy called Croesus who has his own place in history.
Speaker 2:Croesus says I'm not going to try and force people to use this alloy anymore. This doesn't make any sense. I'm going to make, instead of one stator, two stators. One stator will be a pure silver, the other one will be a pure gold and the fact that the price between them may vary. All that means is or gold and the fact that the price between them may vary. All that means is that we can change the size of the gold stators to match as we go on, or you can just pay what you think they're worth in terms of their actual relative value from day to day, but you don't have to destroy the currency. It can all carry on and that stabilizes the currency and that makes everything work so straight away. You have this extraordinary thing of the link between moving on to a gold standard, the gold coin, and divinity. This has come out of the destruction of the temple. So the destruction of the temple is actually much more important in terms of global history than we have ever realized. We only know about it in terms of biblical history.
Speaker 2:This economic history is really striking and the Daniel story is really a kind of comic element in this in a way, because what happens is that the assault on babylon by cyrus of persia which is when daniel is in babylon um, that assault, um is at a point where, uh, he is going to totally disrupt that. He is going to totally disrupt that attack is going to totally disrupt the economy of Babylon. And the writing on the wall in the story now, was there any writing on the wall? I have no idea.
Speaker 2:It seems very unlikely, but in the story it says that the writing on the wall is mene, mene, tekel, ufasin, which gets translated generally as being weighed, measured and found wanting. But that's not actually its meaning. Many and tekel and ufasin are three coins or two coins, and and a word that means halved, so tekel is the shekel. So mene, tekel, ufasin means that the value of the coin is halved and it's actually a financial prognostication that is going to follow from an event that nobody knows is going to happen. But when it happens, very shortly afterwards, when Cyrus takes Babylon, there is a complete collapse, of course, of the ratio and an enormous loss of power and value in the economy of Babylon, and it's it's easier to understand what that is, that writing on the wall in terms of a financial prognostication, like suddenly seeing seeing the writing on the wall, is like seeing your a trader seeing his screen suddenly being covered in red.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I like that, that analogy that you wrote, and I'd never looked at it that way, I'd never understood that, and that's fascinating Really. The picture too. It's kind of a Twilight Zone morality tale. You conquer Jerusalem for the gold. You extract it from every temple, from everything. You extract the gold and you take it and of course it collapses as the unintended consequence of not enriching you but devaluing you what you value.
Speaker 2:That's right. Yeah, this happens a lot of course in history.
Speaker 1:Yeah the parallels to columbus, you know, and the 1492 and onward, and the Spanish and the conquistadors. I've looked at that pattern of history and I thought, well, if there was not this explosion of gold and silver onto the market and all the rest, would it have have created? I don't think so. The history, the pattern of the river of history that we're on right now, where the stream of history, where you have the Industrial Revolution and all this other thing, I think markets exploded. There was a lot of growth post-New World and into the 16th century, unless I'm reading it wrong. Did it have a similar effect that it did on the Babylonians?
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, and what you're looking at in the 16th century. The fundamental problem is when you have an, you know, inflation. What is inflation? Too much money chasing too few goods yeah, that was what my father taught me when I was a kid. That's what inflation is. So the too much money chasing too few goods means that all that money is pouring into an economy which actually isn't developing or changing in any particular way. So because there is money, this gold is coming in and there is nothing else happening. So all that can happen is that the gold loses its purchasing power.
Speaker 2:But in economies where you can get change, the way in which that inflation affects the economy is that the social change then makes new things happen. So what happens with that inflation affects the economy is that the social change then makes new things happen. So what happens with that inflation which fundamentally transforms the nature of European civilization, is that people who are living on incomes that can't adjust to the inflation, which means basically landowners, because land has got fixed rents in the early modern period, so it doesn't matter what happens to the value of money. The rent isn't going to change. So the purchasing power of the rent is going down.
Speaker 2:So this means that the great aristocrats are all being impoverished, whereas people who have activities where they can change what they charge for things, which means traders, but also certain kinds of functionaries Soldiers do very well out of an inflationary period. Builders do very well out of an inflationary period, so do night watchmen these people who can charge what they need to charge. So you get a change in the nature of society, where new people become rich and the old grandees live lives of increasing impoverishment in their grandiness, and so the nature of society itself changes. This is one of the ways in which gold directly affects history, without anybody really understanding at the time that this is what's going on. And new societies and cultures are being born out of this change in purchasing power and opportunity, and old ones are changing because what was regarded as the elite part of the culture becomes the impoverished part.
Speaker 1:It's interesting too, like the Spanish have their just through their grasp, but like all the gold and silver flows through, they don't keep anything their empire't uh bolstered. By it I mean maybe a temporary boon, but nothing like it's.
Speaker 2:Just um filters through and and well, there are a number of reasons for this. I mean, one is, of course, in that period there are very, very few people who understand anything to do with economics or record keeping or accountancy, so they don't actually know what the how much money they've got. Um, and none of the sovereigns of 16th century europe had any idea of what the value, what the value of their own incomes was, of what the value of their own incomes was. They, just because their standard of living was not something they calculated, it was entitlement, and they left it to nature to provide that entitlement without having any way of working out what it was. And this carries on for an astonishingly long time. It was, um, and this carries on for an astonishingly long time.
Speaker 2:I mean in the 18th century when, um, uh, the french economy runs into terrible trouble in the 18th century because france has got no gold. Um and uh, so you have louis the 14th who, having built himself a suite of regal furniture out of silver, now decides he's going to have a suite built out of gold. He can't do it because there isn't that much gold in france, and france runs out of gold completely. And a chap comes up with a possible solution of replacing gold currency with paper money. He says I can perform magic, I can make gold out of paper. And people think that he's making a joke. He is making a joke, but he's also saying actually you don't need gold as the basis, you go with currency, we can print paper money and it'll work. Um, and it didn't work. The reason it didn't work was because, of course, they printed far more of it than they could, so it just devalued itself. But there's a very interesting commentary on this by Rousseau, who wrote that when this man, john Law, came along to teach everybody that he could have paper money, this man, john Law, came along to teach everybody that he could have paper money.
Speaker 2:There was nobody in France who understood the meanings of any words to do with finance. They didn't know what credit was, they didn't know what a share was, they didn't know anything about interest. They had no understanding of any of these things. We live in a society in which we are all very, very plugged in to numbers and we all keep records, we all keep accounts for ourselves and we all know what money we have put away where and what's happening to it, where and what what's happening to it. This is a very modern phenomenon. By and large, people have no idea of what money they had or what would happen to it, because there's no numbers. Were a mystery to people I.
Speaker 1:I would be able to talk to you for hours, which now kept you here, and I promised you I'd be just at an hour or so, but I want before I can talk for nine days.
Speaker 1:Unfortunately, there's something I was taught by the colleague, it's fascinating and there's and I'm glad you brought up john law because I was, I had that on my notes to get to, but we've covered anyway. What we got there is funny because you got there without me even prompting, because we're going to talk about john law and there was, you know, the outlawing of gold at certain times and it always comes back. And now we've this is my last question for you and going in to wrap things up because I want the audience, uh, wanting more. So they go get your book because it's against very, very well written, very dense, it's got so much in there stuff you didn't know. I mean, uh, I'm still, I I'm going to read it again just because there's so much in there, uh, and it's unlike anything else.
Speaker 1:So you know, we've we talked about the nixon shock earlier and and you know, if you look at the metrics of things that happened since 1971 and the world, what's happened to the world, like the financial world that we've become, especially in the United States, back before 1971, there were no commercials about getting into the stock market. There was no 401ks. There's no IRAs, there was no 401ks, there's no IRAs. It was, you know, the American dream was, you know, you get a well-paying job, you own a home, put some savings away, things like that, and it would retain, you know, its value over time and you would be able to accumulate. You know your work, you'd be able to store that away.
Speaker 1:And that's changed drastically. No-transcript, nobody even talks about that anymore. It's like not even on the, not even on the docket. So we live in a post. You know this world, it it's post gold standard, it's a fiat standard, at least for now. Where do you think this ends up? I mean, do you think that the world, when they talk about it at Davos and the great reset and all these other things, does this come into this gold? Because you see central banks buying? Do you see central banks buying? Do you see this pivot again where we go back to a gold standard? Or, as gold as it becomes, does it retain its monetary place, its throne as the world's reserve currency somehow?
Speaker 2:The idea of gold as a currency has obviously always been slightly body batty, but it's always been there all the same. Um I, where we are going now, um, personally, uh, right, firstly, I have no prophetic powers. I have no idea what's going to happen. Um, but um, I am conscious, from reading a lot of history, that the notion that you can have, for example, a man living in your country who is reckoned to have more than one dollar for every star in the solar system is meaningless and unsustainable. But that is the Musk arithmetic. Apparently, more than 450 million. That's the number of stars in the solar system, in the galaxy, not the solar system, the whole Milky Way. He's got more dollars than there are stars in the Milky Way. If you believe that and you think that that is sustainable, then you can carry on being cheery about the way life is going to move. If you think, however, that that will go the way of John Law's paper money, which there is quite a history of that sort of thing happening then we're all going to go through a period of extreme pain. How you come out the other end, I don't know. We will come out the other end because people are very inventive and they create things and people need to stay alive and they will find ways of doing deals with each other, but whether it will be on the basis that they're doing the deals now, I can't really see how that will work.
Speaker 2:Of course, as we all know, there are a number of countries powerful, very wealthy countries that in some cases that are anxious to have nothing to do with the dollar and are looking for alternative basis for currency. And I think the BRIC countries now have an economic scale because they include China and India and Brazil that exceeds the non-BRIC countries. So the possibility of them being able to organize their life around a non-dollar, non-currency, which uses gold, I think, is probably quite high. Also, one of the effects of the massive increase in the value of gold is that it is gradually moving closer to the point where there is enough value represented in the gold in circulation to match the scale of global trade. Not yet, but it's moving in that direction. When it does get there, if it does get there, then perhaps you can expect some kind of return to a gold standard, and that would imply I don't know you'll be better at the arithmetic of this than me, but it would imply that the gold price is going to quadruple to reach that point which?
Speaker 1:probably wouldn't happen.
Speaker 2:It'd be something like that yeah, which is not out of reach.
Speaker 1:No, not out of reach at all. It's interesting. There's a lot of arguments going on right now. A couple of years ago, I was at the Bitcoin conference in Nashville and I watched Michael Saylor, who pushes Bitcoin and he's got his company that buys Bitcoin showing the charts of the global wealth, and I've just always stuck with me, alan. It has these blocks of hundreds of trillions here and there between currency, real estate, sovereign wealth, funds, bonds, so it's hundreds of trillions in the world economy. And then over in the left-hand corner had these tiny graphs and that was like gold's market cap at like $20 trillion, and then it was like Bitcoin's at $2 trillion, and so it's like a fraction of all these supposed wealth in the world. And so I think there's a lot of room for these things like gold or silver or Bitcoin to absorb some of that so-called value around the world.
Speaker 1:My question to you with this history and this is where I stop short of, because I like the technology of something like Bitcoin and of course, you always know how much is on the ledger it's digital I could send you Bitcoin right now and in that way, it's superior to gold. Of course, gold does something that Bitcoin can't do and that's. You can hold it in your hand, I can wear it, I can store it. You know other things outside of the digital ledger. However, a lot of the Bitcoin people believe that Bitcoin is going to demonetize gold and silver. I don't ever see a day, because of our history, that gold is demonetized or that it doesn't have this intrinsic value of some sort. Do you have any thoughts on that as we close?
Speaker 2:I just wanted to get your take on it. Gold is peculiar. You can't, obviously, use gold to go out and buy a loaf of bread. That bit's impossible. Nevertheless, gold seems to be exchangeable everywhere in the world if you ever need to. One of the big differences in my head between gold and these digital currencies is, of course, that gold doesn't depend on an infrastructure, and anything that depends on an infrastructure is itself inherently risky. Obviously, if the current stops flowing, your Bitcoins are a little difficult to access, but the gold is just lumps of stuff. Money is stuff.
Speaker 2:I personally am a great enthusiast for the Chinese theory of currency and what it's for, called the Guangxi, which starts a theory of money written in probably the 6th century BC, which says money doesn't have to be stuff. It really shouldn't be anything of any particular value. Have to be stuff, it really shouldn't be anything of any particular value. What it is is the mechanism by which trade can take place. So this is purely a representation that allows trade to take place, and there needs to be enough money in the system for the trade to balance. If there's too little, then that's what the Guangxi calls light, and you have devaluation. If there's too much, it's what the Guangxi calls heavy, and you have inflation, and these things will tend to balance out over time. It's a very sophisticated theory, developed, as I say, 6th century BC and finally grasped to a certain extent in 18th century.
Speaker 2:Europe Took a little while, but the whole theory of that which was, incidentally, the basis of the Mongols introducing paper currency, which worked pretty well for a long time and that was using that text is that there has to be an authority that stands behind it.
Speaker 2:There has to be an imperial power which is going to stand behind that valueless currency and say that's what it is and if you don't treat it like that, I will cut your head off. Now, it's possible that that's where we're going. It depends how confident people are in wanting a democracy. It's easier to run a money system with an imperial power mandate that says this is what the money is going to be worth, mandate that says this is what the money is going to be worth and you're going to do it, or you're in deep shit, um, and if you hit a big crisis, as we may be going to, then that can be one of the things that emerges from it is a monetary power which is a political power that says I'm going to make this work, and the population will tend to be enthusiastic about that, I suspect.
Speaker 1:Well, I think we think along the same lines. It's almost like there's a change in the economic system that's precipitated by a crisis. Sometimes you could call it manufactured, we'll see. You could call it manufactured, we'll see. And we certainly dug ourselves into a hole with whatever this fiat experiment is since 1971. For good or ill, here we are. I call it the giant digital puffball. I like that. We need to make that into a t-shirt. Well, again, alan herrera, the, the book is gold. How it shaped history. Ladies and gentlemen, go get it, it will enlighten you. It's a great work. And, before I close, alan, um, again, thank you for being here, thank you for doing the show. Uh, so enjoyed our, our conversation and maybe we could do this again, or maybe an update, but I wanted to uh see what else you're working on, if you wanted people to find any other parts of your work or anything that you do well, the other thing that I'm always working on is stuff with the kogi, um and uh.
Speaker 2:If you, uh, I've just put a piece on facebook, um, with a wonderful article on the kogi and which I think should be very rightly read, because here you have people who say you've got the world into deep shit. We know how to get out of it. Listen to us, stop thinking you know everything. We can tell you how to do things that will actually protect nature and look after it. That's a voice we really need. When I first went to them, they said we can help you and I thought I've never heard indigenous people say something like that before. They usually say we want you to help us. That's the voice I want to hear.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Yeah, this is a fascinating thing with the Kogi and I. I'd not known that. I'd not known about them, them or heard about them before your book and I'm interested to see more of that it, so they understand how you live with nature and help nature flourish.
Speaker 2:And they say we don't have the faintest idea, we don't think that way, and so we have to learn and they want to show us, which is a great gift and so if you want people to find your work, you have a website or anything people go to or yes, people could go to the two possible websites. One is my name, dot co dot, uk, alan herrera. Dot co dot, uk, or the other is more complicated, the name of the trust, called the tyrona trust t-a-i-r-o-N-A trustorg.
Speaker 1:Okay, If you'll send me those after we're done recording, I'll put them in the show notes.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much, indeed, it's been a wonderful opportunity. I'm very glad to have had this conversation. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for being so tolerant of me.
Speaker 1:Tolerant. It's a fascinating show and love the conversation. I'm just. I'm still rereading your book right now and enjoying it. So thank you for your work and everything you do. In a sea of things that sometimes are just boring to me anymore or horrifying, I get to have a great conversation, so thank you. Thank you, Alan, and folks go out and find Alan's work and uh support him and check up on him. He's uh he's been very generous and um it's.
Speaker 1:It's again as somebody who's read a lot of history and I'm an amateur, but, um, since I was a young soldier and, and, and especially like northern iraq and ingesting history, I love book. So go get it and support Alan and support us. Go get us a five-star review where you're finding podcasts for Paratroopers. It helps. We got more great shows coming up with great guests, just like this. We'll see you next time, thanks.